Fire captain says his taxidermy animals are created, not
stuffed
Stepping into Mark Dias’ workshop is a bit eerie at first. A
monstrous 10-foot Alaskan Brown Bear lies stiff on its back, paws
clawing at the air, teeth showing, looking as if it can break out
of its state of unsettled rest at any minute.
Fire captain says his taxidermy animals are created, not stuffed
Stepping into Mark Dias’ workshop is a bit eerie at first. A monstrous 10-foot Alaskan Brown Bear lies stiff on its back, paws clawing at the air, teeth showing, looking as if it can break out of its state of unsettled rest at any minute.
Wild pigs line the rafters, tusks showing. Deer, elk and antelope busts spot the walls, eyes following your every step. Ducks and owls are frozen in flight, and a badger lurks on a fake patch of dirt.
Dias uses the cramped workspace of his Hollister garage to run Mark’s Taxidermy, a part-time job he refers to as a hobby.
The stout, mustached 38-year-old makes the most of his four-day-off workweek as a fire captain at the California Department of Forestry Headquarters in Morgan Hill. On those days he practices the craft of taxidermy for a clientele that stretches from the South Valley to the Central Coast.
The 20-year learning process has been “trial and error,” he said.
“I used to see the deer heads on the wall of my grandfather’s house and it just kind of piqued my interest,” Dias said.
Dias would fiddle around with the skins of deer that he caught on hunting trips, but never did much with them until he took a taxidermy class in college that focused on mounting birds.
“I didn’t even get a bird mounted, it fell apart,” Dias said. “But I had all the tools. I started in a little corner in my parents’ garage.”
The trial and error paid off. He graduated to his own garage and got the birds to hold together.
Flipping through a pile of Polaroid pictures of his work, Dias shows a photo of a Harlequin mysteriously suspended in flight by a splash of water made out of a clear resin, and a photo of a duck perched elegantly on a rock covered with synthetic snow.
He keeps pictures of almost all of his creations, which number in the thousands, ranging from a simple deer head to hang on the wall to animals mounted in elaborate display cases he has created for California state parks.
Dias works from reference books to create the natural-looking scenes, which helps bring the animals to life.
But the displays are just one part of taxidermy, which Dias points out is a process of assembly – not stuffing, as people believe.
Rather than using hay or straw to stuff animal skins, which were the early methods employed in taxidermy, the craft now uses high-density foam models to hold the shape of the animal.
The foam models, which can be ordered for almost any animal, full-bodied or just the head, are like a malleable store mannequin. The hard foam can easily be carved, allowing animals to be arranged in various poses, or they can feature different facial expressions.
A mounted wild pig head can be constructed to have its head and eyes tilted to look at you when you walk in a doorway, capturing the realism of the animal.
Foam appendages can be cut off and reattached in the desired position so that a mountain lion looks like it’s sitting pensively next to a stream or stalking its prey, ready to pounce.
Dias begins the taxidermy process by taking various measurements of the facial structure, such as the distance between the nose and eye, to know which size foam model to order.
Once the measurements are taken, Dias skins the animal, turns it and salts it, a process that takes the bacteria out of the skin so the hair will set. The salting process turns the skin into a stiff, hard form that is sent to a tannery to be re-hydrated and pickled, restoring the natural oils.
With the purged oils restored and the hair treated, the skin comes back pliable, feeling like a soft carpet, ready to be pulled over the foam model and sewn on.
“People just think it’s a stuffed head,” Dias said. “They don’t know that the cleaning and preparing of the skin is comparable to that of a leather car seat or coat.”
The only parts of the animal used in the mounting are the skin and antlers or tusks of the various animals. Glass marbles are used for the eyes and rubber is used for the tongue. The skin surrounding the nose and eyes are painted to better match the original color.
“It’s art. It’s a lot more than sticking something together,” Dias said.
The reasons people want to have animals mounted are as varied as the type of animals with which Dias has worked.
Over the years he has mounted possums, bobcats, fawns, squirrels, birds, giraffes, wart hogs, impalas, wilder beasts and an array of others.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be this monster deer with huge horns,” Dias said. “A lot of it is the memory of the hunt. It might have been a memoir between brothers, a friendship or a special moment that caught their eye and they chose to get it mounted and want to preserve it indefinitely.”
Dias’ living room is stocked full of mounted animals. Deer and wild pig heads protrude form the wall, staring from all angles. But the animal that Dias turns to first is a big horned sheep perched upon a fake rocky outcrop that opens up as a video cabinet.
“I chased it all day long,” Dias says, recalling the hunt of the sheep. “I put a lot of time and energy into that animal, so I mounted its full body.”
While memories play a large part in the decision to mount an animal, the trophy aspect of an animal also comes into play. Hunters want to show off the deer with the rare third antler, the elk with the isometric horns or the pig with the three-inch tusks.
Dias recalls the full-body Musk Ox that he mounted for a couple from Santa Cruz, who wanted to show-off the unique 1,400-pound animal that they caught on a hunt in the Arctic Circle. And then there’s the full-bodied Alaskan Brown Bear that was hunted in 1970 and is now on its back in Dias’ garage. The massive creature was stolen from its owners’ game room and delivered to Dias with a broken mouth and missing paws. The repairs have been made and the animal is waiting to be returned so the owner can once again show off his trophy hunt.
Dias says his business depends on these trophy hunts. Business picks up during hunting seasons, timed so the horns of the deer and the tusks of the pig are well developed.
But while Dias’ customers get their enjoyment out seeing the animal they hunted perched above their fireplace, Dias gets his kicks out of creating them
“I like to work with my hands so I’m creating a piece of art, that’s where I get the enjoyment out of it,” Dias says. “I take a flat skin and make it look real.”
